The Leaked Trump/Russia Dossier Contains A Lot More Than ‘Golden Showers’ — Here’s What We Know

As we all know by now, Buzzfeed released a dossier that had been circulating in Washington for months, that contained, among other things, allegations that Donald Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on each other in a Moscow hotel room. Supposedly, a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, who holds extensive connections in Russia, was hired to collect “opposition research,” aka “oppo,” about Trump. (The BBC has reported that Steele and his firm were initially hired by Jeb Bush’s SuperPAC, but multiple people connected to Bush’s failed campaign have come forward to dispute the accusation, so who hired Steele is still unclear at this time.) The internet had jokes, and then Trump hit the roof, and the internet had more jokes, but that was just one page of a fascinating thirty-five-page collection of what could amount to gossip with a lot of dirt to dig through.

The most important point to make, at the moment, is that it’s unknown how much of the report is substantiated, which means that some media outlets — most notably the New York Times —don’t trust it. Even Buzzfeed, which published the dossier, states that it contains some errors. Nonetheless, it’s still fascinating to dig into and raises a host of potential red flags — once you get past the sensational aspect of the report centered around alleged sexual perversions — as it’s reasonable to assume that some parts of it may be true, given the spy credentials of the person who compiled it and the seriousness with which people in government took it (This made it all the way up to the president, after all). For benefit of those who don’t have time to read the entire report, here are the five main highlights.

I never took a journalism or journalism ethics class, but I’m assuming that’s where you learn to start at the top with “NEWS” and finish with “Again, none of this has been substantiated.” The only thing missing is the “REPORT:” up in the headline

So nowadays we can label anything we want as News as long as we admit within the article that it’s all hypothetical? I understand that it’s all the rage to talk about this peepee fantasy we have of DJT, and that’s fine. I just think it’s silly to label it as news and then use this disclaimer as if it somehow makes it all okay.

It’s nothing like, say, the National Enquirer running a grainy black and white photo from the 60’s of a man they claimed was Ted Cruz’s father posing with Lee Harvey Oswald and then Donald Trump using that to publicly insinuate on multiple occasions that Rafeal Cruz was involved in the Kennedy Assassination. Or, say, the President-Elect leading a movement that claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the sitting President was a foreign-born Muslim ineligible to hold the office of President and the media actually reporting on it. These are just two examples of about 800 million. Would you say that Uproxx is the Donald Trump of internet pop culture news aggretators? Oh wait, you support the guy, so you probably wouldn’t say that.

I can understand the vast majority of Trump voters wanting to ignore the implications of this intel report. Especially since they ignored all of the many horrible things that existed as fact as he was running for president such as the rape of the 13 year-old-girl and the defrauding of millions of dollars from poor elderly people and a war widow whose husband died in Iraq, in tuition payments to that phony Trump University. This, and so much more was readily available as part of court transcripts, undeniable and sworn to be true before the court, but ignored by Trump fan clubs everywhere. So why would they pay any attention to this unless it was part of the pre-show at a WWE wrestling event?

You see, the problem with articles such as this and other future stories, is that one will ALWAYS have to keep an open mind on what to believe…because some group decided to throw the “Fake News Story” tab out there and now anything you read on the web could be considered as fake…Quite a conundrum. My guess is that its going to whittle down to a battle of grey matter….the wing nuts vs. the tree huggers…